Leasing Las Vegas

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Detour.

You know what will make me feel like it's the late 1990s again real quick? (If you answered "There's a Clinton in the White House" you're a little ahead of yourself, but just by a few months.) What will make me feel like it's the late 1990s again real quick is watching a movie about verbose criminals getting themselves into hyper-violent timeline-warping shenanigans - Things To Do In Denver When You're 8 Heads In A Duffel Bag; that ol' Pulp Fiction addiction. 

Do you guys remember that time Oliver Stone tried to out-Tarantino Tarantino (even though Tarantino was always really trying to out-Stone Stone) and made U Turn? That's the Tarantino-ish that Detour reminded me the most of. And U Turn's not a bad thing to be reminded of! U Turn is nuts, in a never not entertaining way! And there are chunks of Detour - which tells the story of a law student (Tye Sheridan) enlisting the aid of some do-badders (Emory Cohen and Bel Powley) in a plot against his step-father - that feel vibrant with that same sort of something-borrowed storytelling flair. Director Christopher Smith (already responsible for the tremendously under-valued thrillers Severance and Triangle) employs real visual wit, and busts out all the toys from the toy-box (De Palma lover that I am I cannot resist a split-screen) to pop and pizazz us.

But the film ultimately doesn't have the conviction of a Stone working his own mirrored riff (much less First Tier Tarantino) and it's more the fault of Smiths' script than it is of direction - the characters are never Characters, Capital C for Characters, like they need to be for something this stylized to take. These are all good performers (even in a role this underwritten you can't take your eyes off of Bel Powley; she is the real deal) but Detour never quite stops feeling like kids play-acting at big people parts. (And kids play-acting Tarantino can work; I have seen Go. We have all seen Go!)

Grade: C+

Califórnia at Tribeca

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on "Califórnia".

California could very easily have been called "Diary of a Teenage Girl." In fact, Estela, the young Brazilian teen in the 1980s at the heart of Marina Person’s film, would get along swimmingly with Minnie Goetz. They share not only a passion for eclectic art (visual in Minnie’s case, musical in Estela’s) but also a growing awareness of their own body and their sexual desires. I hate opening reviews with comparisons like these but Person’s film works so much like a beautiful companion to that other coming of age tale that I wish I could’ve caught them back to back. They have plenty to say to one another about teenage girls, sex, and the ways we seek in artistic outlets as a way to make sense and escape our own lives. Scored by what may well be the hippest mixtape soundtrack at the festival (Bowie! Joy Division! The Cure! New Order!), Person’s film even manages to lace through Estela’s story (via her uncle Carlos who’s come home from the west coast state from the film’s title) an AIDS subplot that doesn’t devolve into melodrama or mere background scenery.

Grade: B

We Could Be Equals Just For One Day

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Equals.

I'd be curious to know if Lil Nicky Hoult got into his parents Blockbuster stash around the tender age of eight and saw some things he wasn't supposed to see... like perhaps the 1996 film Trainspotting and the 1997 film Gattaca? Because he's totally spent the past year trying to remake the two of them. Kill Your Friends, the Trainspotting wannabe, has already come and gone without much love lost or gained, and now we have Equals, a shiny "doomed by science fiction" romance for the Swipe Right Age.

Equals - the tale of a gleaming future where emotion's verboten - makes a much more successful case for itself. Yes it echoes Andrew Niccol in every perfume-ad pretty shot, all futuristic silvers and golds shimmering beneath the camera's upturned palm. You've never seen skin as devastatingly luminescent as Hoult's here - he resembles nothing less an unnamed organism from under the sea seeing light for the first time, a spectacle of unspeakable translucence squinting at the sun.

His purity has a point and a purpose though, beyond just its usual pretty surface charms - his cheeks flood with color, bathing the screen and the palette, pinkening, tells us he's seeing what a lot of us have for awhile now... namely hot damn, Kristen Stewart, you're on fire! Burn it up!

Yes, the other half of this romance is no stranger to the soft glow of twilight (you know, Twilight) but far from sullen here KStew is a barely contained nervy jangle, a tremor, dark eyes sunken in a sea of foam. She makes you lean in, which is what this romance needs - look closer. Closer. And once you do, once you're spinning in their orbit, wham, that's that. You're under. They make a surprising pair but they work, and there's defnitely a queerness to it - they're meeting in the middle, gender-wise, with their utilitarian costuming and eyelashes for days; love like an invention, self-built, new and shiny... so shiny it stings.

Grade: B

Strike a Pose

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on Strike a Pose.

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Strike a Pose with Madonna: Truth or Dare. After all, that now iconic documentary is really on a league of its own. Then again, this newer doc, which focuses on the male dancers from that 1991 film (and from the Material Girl’s Blond Ambition Tour) cannot help but drum up the comparisons. As a pseudo-sequel to Truth or Dare, Strike a Pose is perhaps less enthralling—no Warren Beatty or Antonio Banderas here—but just as entertaining. And while the first twenty or so minutes of the film do indeed feel like a sequel in spirit if not in name (we get to revisit the tour and the doc in ways that show us how much these dancers kept to themselves even as they seemingly opened up their lives for Madge and the camera), this documentary soon reveals itself to be something much rarer.

In profiling these men 25 years after the fact, Strike a Pose becomes a rare portrait of the middle-aged dancer, a figure that we’re not often offered on screen. It’s often hard to hear what these guys went through—you’ll be surprised to hear candid talks about AIDS that even Truth or Dare, despite its activist zeal given its time,couldn’t and didn’t breach—and it’s even more heartening to see their resilience. It was hard, many of them note, to have always lived with the, for better or for worse, “Madonna dancer” label especially given how their relationships to the Queen of Pop frayed soon after (addiction, rehab, and lawsuits didn’t help). By the time we see all of them reunite for the first time in decades and see them playing the infamous game of “Truth or Dare” again, you cannot help but feel a kinship to these people some of us have felt we’ve known for just as long. For Madonna fans, this is an unmissable film. But where directors Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan succeed is in producing a touching portrait of ageing, of finding the inspiration and the drive to keep going even when the promise of youth (and the promise you had in your own youth) threatens to disappear.

Grade: B+

Katie Holmes Directs All We Had

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on All We Had.

To say Rita Carmichael is Katie Holmes’s best role and best performance to date seems almost like a backhanded compliment. After all, Joey Potter aside, what else comes close to that description? Nevertheless, there’s no denying that Holmes has thrown herself into the role of this drunk single mother whose solution to her problems is putting “all we had” into their car and driving away, hoping the signs (on the road and, you know, of the universe) lead her to where she needs to be.

Holmes is a prickly presence on screen as Rita, finding ways of making her sunken eyes and oft-mimicked mouth quirks work to her advantage to sketch out this clearly broken woman who’s trying her darndest to offer her teenage daughter (a solid Stefania Owen in white trash Rory Gilmore-mode) a better life but obviously failing miserably. The film opens with the type of scene the screenplay surely believes functions as a perfect metaphor for the narrative as a whole: “You have to push me,” Rita urges her daughter as she stands on a chair in a bathroom, a string wrapped around an infected tooth. The scene is later replayed, as if we need reminding that in this mother-daughter duo the young one is the more responsible one, the one who's left to make the necessary hard choices for them to live another day on the road even as the film squarely puts them in the middle of the financial crisis making their journey that much harder.

Overall, All We Had functions as a great acting showcase but it never quite settles into its own rhythms. Given its episodic nature (owing perhaps to the film’s source material, the Annie Weatherwax novel of the same name), and its odd blend of neatly packaged YA clichés in a rather well-intentioned attempt at socio-economic commentary (the script was written by Faults in Our Stars writer/director Josh Boone), it’s no surprise the film flounders under its own weight.

Its most interesting subplot (there are several, including Mark Consuelos as a real estate agent, Richard Kind as a well-meaning diner owner, Kimmy Schmidtt’s Katherine Reis as a high school mean girl, Siobhan Fallon as a school principal) is the one centered on Peter Pam, a trans waitress at the diner who one worries will become a mere plot device but who instead becomes a surprisingly well-rounded character that almost made me wish the film knew what it had in its hands. Prop to Eve Lindley who I hope we see in more things in the future.

At the end of the day, this is a solid debut for Holmes (her work with actors is very promising and while the lens-flares-filled sky shots are a bit much, she finds unfussy compositions for her shots that suggest an attuned eye for drama in the frame). Here’s hoping she finds stronger material in the future.

Grade: C+/Katie Holmes B+